Microsoft Announces ReFS, a New Filesystem For Windows 8 459
bonch writes "Microsoft has shared details about its new filesystem called ReFS, which stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed 'Protogon,' ReFS will first appear as the storage system for Windows Server and later be offered to Windows clients. Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used NTFS features while maintaining 'a high degree of compatibility' for most uses. NTFS has been criticized in the past for its inelegant architecture."
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
That's very interesting given the article says
There are some NTFS features for which Microsoft plans to drop support with ReFS, specifically named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas, Verma blogged. That said, one of Microsoftâ(TM)s goals with ReFS is to âoemaintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint,â Verma said.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I do wish Windows had a sane soft-link system like *nix does; I've yet to run into an application that automatically dereferences a .lnk when opening it. You have to futz around with opening the link manually, reading it's redirect, and then opening THAT instead. Very crude and ugly.
Man, if only [microsoft.com].
(OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:3, Informative)
So they are starting to catch up with the ext3 filesystem.
I thought it sounded pretty much like a dumbed down version of AFS... from the early 90s. The problem is I never use any of that extra stuff because I have no use for it. I don't remember if I can do sparse with AFS because I don't care about sparse. At home I do the openafs thing for linux, mac, and windoze and everything is in AFS, so I don't really care what windows uses natively, its just kind of a bootloader to get to my real files over afs.
I hope there is a way to disable file level compression, because nothing sucks worse than shoving pre-compressed media files into and out of another compressor. Also it screws CPU performance in favor of storage space... So my storage is limitless or its incompressible data, but my CPU gaming cycles are limited, I'm not seeing this turn out well.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
You need to RTFA. The grandparent was a spoof. ReFS doesn't support compression. Or short-names. etc.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
There's a blog post [msdn.com] linked from the article.
There's all kinds of promising stuff, like data corruption resilience and dropped/extended limits.
Much more interesting read than the linked ZDNet article.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Let's see: 32K file name and path limits (instad of 255), on-line recovery from corruption (no more "Check Disk" or offline recovery-rebuild), faster performance, built in recovery of data on failed disks (via Storage Spaces), hot-adding-more-storage to volumes, better control of allocation and localization on the drive, attribute checksums (and auto detection and recovery from "bitrot")....
Did you RTFA at all?
Full of sound and fury, signifying an idiot (Score:2, Informative)
Note the collaboration between this, and numerous other "contributors" between extremely verbose first posts submitted within the same minute
It's called "being a subscriber". Since you don't even know that we can all just assume you've not ever been one and are just a leech.
As for "being paid", I don't know that many people are paying to have humorous articles posted to Slashdot.
You did realize his post was humor, right? It was not to subtle for you to comprehend, right?
Oh.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:4, Informative)
Some of those features are actually useful
Yes, and they're DROPPING those features.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
TechGuy's a troll who's gotten the most first-posts in the last week AND every one has either promoted an MS product or bashed a Google one. One even said "Use Silverlight instead of Dreamweaver for making a website".
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, he's also very, very fast to be able a) read the article, b) concoct a funny answer, c) post it the same minute the article was published.
All that without subscriber account, note.
He's really agile with the keyboard, this guy, he does it fourth time already today.
Re:Full of sound and fury, signifying an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, you see that asterisk [slashdot.org] right next to his nickname that means "a subscriber account"... Oh, wait, there's none.
Re:Eliminate Drive Letters (Score:3, Informative)
You're reversing cause and effect. A volume isn't boot because it's C:\, it's assigned C:\ because it's boot. Behind the scenes the drive letters don't exist. It's an abstraction, in a similar way that sda, sdb, sdc are.
Re:32K long file names? That'll be useful... (Score:5, Informative)
... to not one.
The real world disagrees with your statement: we have TFS projects with long directory and file names, such that we cannot map the entire TFS source in a single folder. Even naming it e.g. "c:\x" (or "d:\", putting it on a separate drive), the paths and files still exceed MAX_PATH (which is 260, [microsoft.com] not 255).
So, this feature will be useful to our shop.
It's also useful for "rolling backups"; I administer family machines, and one has been upgraded from a desktop, to a laptop, to another laptop. The first upgrade, I copied all the files to "c:\e" (old machine was an eMachine). That laptop died, we used a restoration company that started with a "G" to get the data back (now we backup via WHS), and I saved that in "c:\g" (so there's a "c:\g\e" with the desktop's files). The third machine (second laptop) has "c:\h" (which also contains "c:\h\g\e"). Other times I've saved backups with more descriptive names, like "Backup of the Dell Inspiron 5150, 2011-11-11", and sometimes those backups fit inside each other like expressed above.
So, I have examples from both home and work where having longer-than-MAX_PATH file/path names would be useful.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:4, Informative)
Does anyone knows what happens between research and productivization at MS?
Management.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:4, Informative)
I work for a Wniversity
Ha, dude, you're busted! You were trying to say "university" and it came out "Windows"! ;-)
Re:Then what file system should we all use? (Score:4, Informative)
How much data did you have on a single large zdev that it required that amount of time? I tend to group mine into groups of 8 disks with raidz2. When I have to rebuild, it does so at the write speed of the new disk (100+MB/sec). If you have a relatively small array and it still takes 45 days to rebuild then you have a hardware issue, or you are using an siig card, which has horrible performance under all the unix/linux variants I have used.
I use zfs on linux at home with an 8 disk raidz2 array for network storage. On a core 2 duo / 2.5ghz using an lsi 1068 based card, I achieve a rebuild speed of 80+MB per second, a scrub speed of 150+MB/sec. At work, I use it to store spatial data / 3d video using zfs on linux. Multiple 8 disk raidz2 devices connected via lsi 9200 card. I achieve a rebuild speed of 80+MB per second, a scrub speed of 250+MB/sec.
If you use junk cards, you get junk performance.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
The "resilience" is from copy on write (CoW), which is used in Volume Shadow Copy and Microsoft SQL server. It is also able to cloud data across multiple volumes on different machines from what I read. Since both CoW and ZFS's copy work a lot like RAID0 (as far as I can tell), I'd expect them to be similar in this respect, however ZFS also does checksum tests and NTFS doesn't BUT I don't know if ReFS will or not.
That said, ZFS is a WAY better file system, and I'll give you a few reasons why:
No max path length restriction (TFA says there still be one for ReFS)
Variable Block sizes and Sparse Files
Allocate on Flush [wikipedia.org]
Block Journaling (aka Journaling File System) as opposed to Metadata only Journaling (NTFS and probably ReFS) which is less reliable
Logical Volume Management [wikipedia.org]
and that is just naming a few off the top of my head with some links to what they mean if it seemed like it may not be obvious (the others are fairly commonly talked about IMO - if you don't know them, they should be easy to search for)
I'm fairly certain NTFS still doesn't support user metadata, either, and I believe zfs does (most modern FS's do), so I doubt ReFS will (what I mean by this is I can tag a piece of data as, say "photos" and then when I search for photos, those are found first - this is a feature like what was planned for WinFS's and what Apple's Spotlight does).
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's OSX uses file extension exclusively to determine what sort of file it is. They used to use creator codes, but those have been removed and now it relies entirely on file extension.
No, creator and type metadata take precedent over file extension. The big change in OSX is that the API and developer tools promote file extensions over metadata. There was a big push to ensure that OSX would work correctly even if it was using a file system that didn't support metadata.
Try this, go to the Finder and select "Get Info" on a data file. Now go to where it says "Open With" and select a different application. Unlike Windows where this selection is forgotten after it opens, on OSX the choice is remembered. The Finder sets the creator metadata of the data file to ensure that it is always opened with the selected application.
So metadata is still used in OSX, but extensions now also play a prominent role.
Re:My preview of ReFS (Score:5, Informative)
Windows also allows you to change the Open With association (and has for many years) but it's stored in the registry as a global configuration for the file type. It's not specific to any given file.
Just thought I'd clear that up.